


In This Shrouding Darkness, I Found You

by Chlorophylz (mynameisnotphy)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blindness, Bullying, Gen, Light Angst, Not Beta Read, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:15:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24783718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mynameisnotphy/pseuds/Chlorophylz
Summary: Haikyuu x Tsumi no Namae 罪の名前Tendou is used to people calling him a monster due to his appearance, believing that he had been cursed at birth by the Goddess of Fate to be scorned by everyone he meets. His only wish is for someone to be his friend.
Relationships: Tendou Satori & Ushijima Wakatoshi
Kudos: 13





	In This Shrouding Darkness, I Found You

**Author's Note:**

> https://youtu.be/KJyL-mXK1_c  
> If you haven’t heard this song, go give it a listen, I implore you.

A little red-haired boy with a bowl cut wanders around the marketplace aimlessly with his sunken eyes wide open in wonder. He is too enamoured with the sights and sounds of the bustling atmosphere to pay any mind to the children hiding behind their parents, pointing to him as if he were a freak.

_Yokai._

That’s what they called him for the most part. 

It seems almost cruel, how a label that slips out of others’ mouths so mindlessly would eventually be associated with the young boy’s appearance, latching to his identity in the form of an offensive nickname.

“You yokai!” his bullies would always say.

"You can’t join our volleyball team, Tendou. This team is for humans like us.”

The boy, Tendou would ignore such hurtful jabs. If he had dwelled over any of it, he would find himself soaking his pillow with tears in the dead of the night, when no one can hear him cry and he would silently pray for his sole wish to be granted. 

_I wish to have at least one person in this world to be my friend._

_If so, living would be such a wonderful thing._

Or at least, he would like to believe that. 

From the day Tendou was born, the Goddess of Fate had taken notice of his existence.

"What a cute little baby. Let's cast a spell on him and have some fun!" declared the Goddess of Fate as Tendou's life has since been plagued by her unyielding presence, shrouding his life in pitch-black darkness, taking on the form of smoking, black tendrils only visible to Tendou himself.

Walking up to the ice-cream stand, Tendou fumbles in his pocket for the allowance he had left for the week and orders his favourite chocolate ice-cream cone from the vendor. 

He could’ve sworn that the vendor had cast a brief scowl at him before breaking into his usual grin, which he greets the other children with.

Human children. Not yokai like himself.

Tendou shakes away the very thought of his bullies making things difficult for him and pays for his chocolate ice-cream. He receives the cone carefully and immediately sinks his teeth into his frosty treat. His teeth scream in retaliation from coming into direct contact with the freezing dessert but he continues to devour it anyway. 

To Tendou, these simple pleasures make life worth living for. It makes him feel more _human_.

To a boy who’s been labelled as a monster all his life, he’s convinced himself that he’s no more than a disgusting freak of nature when he’s simply a child who wants a friend to talk to and a team to play volleyball with.

Seeing as he has a few hours left before his curfew, Tendou decides to take a shortcut through an alley to his favourite playground, where he would be able to talk to other kids.

Other kids who would hopefully be his friends. Even just one would be nice.

“Hey! It’s the creepy yokai!”

Tendou stops in his tracks upon hearing that dreaded, familiar voice. A volleyball hits him hard in the shoulder, causing him to lose his grip on his half-eaten ice-cream.

His dessert launches towards the grimy pavement with a heart-wrenching splat.

“How can yokai eat human food?” taunts his bully with a smug, condescending grin. 

“Yeah,” chimes in one of his bully’s cronies. “Won’t they die from poisoning?”

“Guess we just saved him from killing himself, huh, fellas?”

Tendou summons every bit of his willpower to conceal his emotions. He isn’t going to cry. Not in front of these people.

Instead, he twitches his lips upwards in an attempt to smile. To appear unintimidated.

“Damn, he’s creepy,” one of the cronies whispers into his bully’s ear. “We don’t even know what he’s thinking right now.”

“That’s an ugly smile,” remarks Tendou’s bully. “Just as ugly as you are, yokai!”

Tendou shifts his gaze to the ground in defeat, where the ice-cream had dropped next to his shoes. Three black rats scamper towards the remains of what was Tendou’s dessert.

“Looks like your family’s here to pick you up, you filthy piece of trash!”

_A new insult added to their dictionary._

_Just great._

“Hey!”

A deep voice calls out from behind Tendou. He whips his head around in shock, only to see a tall boy around his age with dark, olive-brown hair and bandages wrapped around his eyes, holding on to a chocolate ice-cream cone in his left hand.

 _Like a ninja_ , thinks Tendou. _A giant ninja._

“Why do you think that rats are so widely scorned?” asks the boy with bandaged eyes.

“They’re filthy, duh!” responds the Tendou’s bully. He puffs out his chest in what appears to be an attempt to show the stranger who’s the boss. As if the stranger could see his assertiveness under those bandages around his eyes.

“Then for the sake of a blind person like me,” the stranger speaks calmly, “please tell me if the rats here truly are filthier than the person you’re making fun of right now. Isn’t your act of picking on someone you’re unfairly discriminating against even more disgusting than rats themselves?”

The shuddering cronies take cover behind their leader, who had already begun to back off upon hearing the stranger speak.

“Never do it again!” yells the stranger. 

Tendou looks on as his bullies take large steps away from him and the stranger who had just stood up for him. He feels his lips twitching upwards in a genuine smile but he can’t seem to ignore the tears that had fogged his vision.

Even his saucer-like eyes fail to contain his overflowing tears.

It doesn’t make sense. He’s happy. Happier than he’s ever been in ages.

So why wouldn’t his tears stop falling?

Staring at the tall boy with the bandaged eyes standing in front of him, Tendou prays that if the kind stranger would ever regain his eyesight one day, he would want to appear as a normal boy to him.

The very thought makes Tendou’s chest hurt.

_But I’m a yokai after all._

_Why am I... me?_

Wiping his tears with his sleeve, Tendou breaks into a dash towards his favourite playground, leaving his visually-impaired saviour in the dust.

Crestfallen, Tendou perches on the empty swing and kicks his feet off the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices a familiar figure lurking around the trees.

“How did you find me?” he calls out to the kind stranger who had helped him earlier.

“I followed your scent,” replies the boy.

“Woah, talk about creepy. Didya track down my yokai energy?”

“But you’re not a yokai. You’re just a regular boy like me.”

“That’s because you cannot see, silly. If you could see what I look like for yourself, you’d agree with those guys from earlier.”

“You are a very kind boy but you hate yourself so much that you start to believe those lies people tell you.”

Tendou sinks his feet into the sand. The swing comes to an abrupt halt.”

“I’m not,” says Tendou bitterly. “Since birth, the Goddess of Fate has taken notice of me. She thought that I was a cute baby so she decided to cast a spell on me for fun. She gave me a creepy face and a skinny body that scares people away. No one wants to be my friend because I’m creepy.”

The kind stranger walks towards Tendou carefully, stretching his free hand out to guide him around the area. Taking pity on him, Tendou guides him to the nearest bench.

“Aren’t ya gonna eat that?” asks Tendou, eyeing the melting ice-cream in the stranger’s hand.

“I’m not too good at making people feel better but here’s my ice-cream cone. It’s chocolate-flavoured. I don't really like it.”

“You don’t want it?” exclaims Tendou in astonishment, unable to process the possibility of someone disliking something as delicious as chocolate ice-cream. “You’ve got to be kidding! Chocolate ice-cream is the absolute best! Why did you buy chocolate ice-cream if you don’t like it?”

“They ran out of mint flavoured ice-cream so I settled for chocolate. Doesn't taste as good as I thought it would.”

“Phew. Thought you got conned into buying a flavour you don’t like because you can’t see. That would be a real bummer. Also, mint ice-cream tastes like toothpaste! How could you like it?”

The tall boy lets out a laugh, which sounds almost like music to Tendou’s ears. It is a laugh so infectious that Tendou finds himself beaming in ecstasy.

In that fleeting moment of happiness, a dark, ominous aura shrouds Tendou’s being, crippling him and forcing air out of his lungs.

The Goddess of Fate plants herself in Tendou’s subconscious with a malicious grin. She wraps her delicate, long fingers around his face and her pointed nails scratching against his forehead.

“If you could see this boy’s ugly face,” she says to the kind stranger, “I wonder what kind of face you’ll make. Quite the sight, isn’t he?”

The Goddess of fate snaps her fingers and the tall boy screeches in pain, doubling over and rubbing his eyes in agony.

 _Oh no,_ thinks Tendou. _I brought misfortune to this kind stranger. I jinxed my chances of befriending him!_

Tendou scrambles towards the stranger worriedly and pries the bandages wrapped around the boy’s eyes, hoping that it’ll do something to help. He is greeted with a pair of warm, olive-brown eyes with the kindest gaze he’s ever seen. 

A stark contrast from all the rude glares and scornful looks he receives on a daily basis. 

Tendou finds himself gazing into the boy’s round, dark olive orbs with such fondness that it is hard for him to describe how happy he feels.

“I can see,” the stranger mutters in astonishment. “I can see again.”

Forgetting that he had been staring at the stranger so rudely the entire time, Tendou whips around out of self-consciousness. The chocolate ice-cream falls from his loosened grasp.

_He saw me. He saw my true form._

“Look, it’s your precious gift from this kind boy here,” says the Goddess of Fate as she scratches Tendou’s forehead with her claw-like nails. “Why won’t you pick it up?”

_This is my punishment, it seems._

_I’ve forgotten my place and became too greedy for a friend._

_Now he’s finally seen what I truly look like—a monster._

Tendou hides his face behind his palms in an attempt to hide the tears pooling behind his eyelids.

_A yokai like me is better off dead, after all._

A firm hand rests on Tendou’s shoulder and he peeps out of his finger gaps to see the stranger smiling rather awkwardly at him.

“Don’t cry,” he says softly. “I will always be by your side until the day we die. From today onwards, you’ll be a normal boy, alright? Will you be my friend?”

Cracks form in the dark mist surrounding Tendou. 

“O-of course! My name’s Tendou Satori! Everyone calls me Tendou! What’s yours?”

“Ushijima Wakatoshi.”

The dark mist dissipates gradually and the Goddess’s grip on Tendou’s face loosens.

“Can I call you Wakatoshi-kun?” asks Tendou earnestly.

“Sure.”

With that, the apparition that once rested on Tendou’s shoulders disappears into nothingness and the dark mist fades away.

It was almost as if the nightmarish spell that had been haunting Tendou from birth had been broken by the kind Wakatoshi-kun, Tendou’s very first friend.

“Say, Wakatoshi-kun, do you like to play volleyball?”

“I love it! I have been playing it since I was very young. My father used to be a pro athlete! I stopped playing when I lost my eyesight. Now that I’ve got it back, I want to play again.”

“Would you like to be on my team?”

“Sure, but we’ll need four more players.”

“Don’t worry about that,” declares Tendou proudly. “I’ll take care of the recruiting. I want to make a whole lot of friends but you’ll always be my best friend, Wakatoshi-kun!”

“Tendou, would you like to come to my house? I want to tell my parents about my eyesight coming back.”

“Oh boy, I’d love to see their reactions! It’ll be such a huge surprise for them—wait, would it be too much of a bother? I don’t want to impose on them and what if I’m too creepy and ugly?”

Wakatoshi places both his hands on Tendou’s shoulders. “You’re not a yokai. You’re my friend.”

“Okay!” says Tendou, lighting up at the reaffirmation. “Let’s go to Wakatoshi-kun’s house to share the good news!”

With that, Tendou tugs at his new friend’s hand and drags him towards the exit leading back to the marketplace.

“You know where I live?”

“No, silly. I’m bringing us back to civilisation. It’s much easier for us to find our way around from there.”

As the sun begins to set in the distance, Tendou tugs at Wakatoshi’s hand tightly, his bony fingers wrapped around the latter’s huge ones. 

The smile that had been plastered across Tendou’s face since Wakatoshi had reaffirmed their friendship doesn’t fade away.

Tendou notices the same old familiar glares cast in his direction but he doesn’t stop to acknowledge any one of them.

As far as he is concerned, he is a normal boy hanging out with his best friend.

He feels empowered and no condescending remark or glare can ever break this newfound spirit of his.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, platonic pairings deserve a whole lot more love. I’m not saying this as an ace but friendships are just as charming as romantic relationships. Really love the dynamics between Ushi and Tendou. They’re the definition of wholesome. Also, I may or may not have been spamming replay on Kimura Subaru's Tomodachi while writing this.
> 
> Gahhh here's my first fic for the wholesome fandom that inspired me to create content again. I welcome any constructive feedback bc I haven't written fanfiction in three years. I'm so rusty OTL


End file.
